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Howland Township kicks off celebration
By Ed Runyan
HOWLAND
The starting point for the new Howland Township History Center to be housed in the basement of the township’s administration building was a conversation a couple of years ago between Louisa Howland Miller and township Administrator Darlene St. George.
Howland-Miller was living in Liberty at the time and decided to talk to someone with Howland Township to see whether they were interested in seeing some of the documents she owned from Joseph Howland, one of her ancestors, after whom the township was named.
“I said, ‘I’m a Howland,’” Howland-Miller remarked Tuesday at the township hall during kickoff ceremonies for the township’s bicentennial celebration.
When Howland-Miller explained she had four journals containing about 3,000 pages of letters written to and by Joseph Howland, it became clear to St. George these items could be of great historical value to the township, Howland-Miller said.
For one thing, the journals contained much of the correspondence related to the land in the township, which all belonged to Joseph Howland in 1798, when he bought it from the Connecticut Land Company.
Howland was a land speculator who never came to Ohio, but he spent many years selling off the land. Many of the letters relate to those land sales.
In the two years since Howland-Miller first told St. George about the journals, the township had them transcribed, and they form the cornerstone of the new history center, Trustee Matthew Vansuch said.
Several members of the Adgate family of Howland attended the ceremony to represent Capt. John Adgate, their ancestor, who was the first resident of Howland and the first person to buy some of Joseph Howland’s land.
Adgate bought 1,600 acres on the western side of the township near the downtown area of Warren and built the first log cabin in the township in 1799. He paid $1,600 for the land, which measured two miles by 11/2 miles.
Howland-Miller’s brother, Dulany Howland of Dallas, explained that Joseph Howland, born in 1749, was an entrepreneur who was best known for being a successful shipping owner and trader. He was extremely wealthy by the standards of 1806 with a net worth of $500,000, Dulany Howland said.
Two of Joseph Howland’s sons were later senior partners in the New York City-based merchant company Howland and Astinwall that played a huge role in the American shipping industry.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great-great grandson of Joseph Howland, and one of Joseph Howland’s ancestors, John Howland, came to America on the Mayflower in 1620 and was a leader in the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts.
County Commissioner Frank Fuda commended the township, which is the largest in the county and also one of the largest in Ohio with its 19,106 residents.
The history center also has acquired early township photographs and will soon acquire the archives of the Bolin family, which lived in the area known as Bolindale in the township’s southwest corner, Vansuch said.